I’ve been there for lunch and it’s my go-to for coffee when I’m heading south or east but last night was my first dinner at The Station in Waimarino (formerly National Park) Village…
The Station has been an icon in the village longer than I’ve lived here. It wobbled then closed during Covid but it is great to see it up and running again under its two lovely new owners, Lily and Sam.
At the end of this local government triennium* (the three year period between local government elections), we members of the Owhango National Park Community Board decided to meet for dinner to talk about how we thought we’d done as a board. We were lucky enough to have the Clive, the council CE, attend as well for high-level council perspectivies.
If you are Ruapehu local and have not yet dined at The Station – why not?? The food is beautiful with a selection that should have something for everyone, filling serving sizes, fast and friendly service and a table right by the fire…cold and wet outside, crispy and warm on the inside.
I can vouch for the crispy chicken starter, susages and mash main and bread and butter pudding…I wish I could have just ordered ‘one of everything’…
The Station Menu as at September 2025
The Station is closed Monday/Tuesday, open for breakfast and lunch Wednesday-Sunday and dinner Thursday-Friday. For years, the village has been missing a location where residents and visitors can conspire with a coffee and a snack before midday. We have that back now…
Something I learned from last night is that there are free EV chargers in the council park and ride by The Station. They are not the fastest but you can plug in before you dine and squeeze in a few more ergs for your journey…
Triennium is a funny word that no doubt dates back to the early days of British style governance. I always wish we had someone in council who drives a Falcon so Ruapehu could have its own Triennium Falcon….
I wasn’t even intending to run for the community board again. Nine years of dealing with Ruapehu District Council is like running an ultra-marathon through treacle.
A couple of days before registrations closed, there were only two candidates in our ward so I decided to run and reduce the risk that the council might have to appoint whoever raised their hand to fill the gaps after the election. There were actually three but one had been temporarily removed because one of his nominators had mysteriously fallen off the lectoral roll.
I’ve lived in Ruapehu since 2004 and worked here since 2014. Prior to 2014 I was in the Army and then the RNZAF and spent most of my time working out of the district, often out of the country. Most of you will probably know me from my time in the Visitor Centre in Whakapapa Village and working at Schnapps.
Whakapapa Village was my introduction to the wonderful eclectic colourful communities we have throughout the district. Every day, we were working with visitors, tourism operators and supporting businesses. The more I engaged, the more I wanted to do more and Mayor Don Cameron sugegsted I run for the Community Board in 2016.
Ruapehu offers so much regardless of which aspect e.g. tourism, farming, traditional business, converation, etc you look at and has massive potential for growth. Growth, NOT exploitation.
The more I became engaged with Ruapehu District Council specifically the senior management, the more I felt that the council is actually one of our biggest obstacles to growth. Pretty much every request feels difficult, and too-hard like some of the bigegst earners in our district don’t feel they have to do the mahi for our communities.
Just to be 100% clear, I have always found the actual staff within council to super friendly helpful and prepared to go the extra mile (or two).
My number one priority for the next three years is to work with other elected members in our community boards, within the Council and our new Mayor, to introduce what I think is long-overdue and much-needed transparency and accountability into the senior echelons of council management.
For the last four years, my rear view on the way home has been something like this…not always wet, sometimes icy or, in the first year, snowing…
Last night was my last…
What was meant to be a six or so month gig to learn a bit more about hospo turned into a four year rollercoaster…learned so much from Spud and Davo, Jase, Keely and Carleen, El Loco, Elise, Caoimhe, Herve, Lydia, Toby, G-man, Koletso and Eddie…
Staff or customers, you get to socialise with the most eclectix mix..Schnapps is an icon not just in National Park Village but across the Central North Island, possible the world, the only pub with views of three active volcanoes, the best burgers and the best crew…
.Going off to do some other stuff for a couple of months and then see what happens next…
I didn’t know Jake, In fact, until yesterday morning, his name was unfamiliar to me, although I had heard of his business, Unfiltered.
Jake was a young Kiwi entrepreneur who leveraged success with a high school business into Unfiltered. Unfiltered’s “thing” was interviewing high profile business leaders and making those interviews commercially available as training resources. It must have been a good idea as Unfiltered attracted around $4.9million in investor support.
Jake died a couple of days ago. Allegedly by his own hand. He was 26.
He had recently sold Unfiltered for a small sum, around $80k, possibly plus some stock in the purchasing company. The Otago Daily Times understates the response from investors as “Investors expressed some frustration at the sale of the business“. Overnight, Jake went from golden boy to devil’s spawn.
Investors and media hounded him around the world. They threatened friends who stood up for him. They attacked and attacked and attacked. Leading this assault was the rabid pack of hyenas known as the New Zealand media.
The fourth estate has some brilliant dedicated insightful writers but as a business group, our media has long side sold itself for click-based gratification, ambush journalism and gotcha articles.
It’s always easier to attack than to help, to push down than to pull up.
Startups fail. It’s a rule. Not all of them but a lot of them. Investors in start-up need to acknowledge risk. They need to do due due dligence and accept that the outcome may not be that which they desire.
Life in the fast lane.
The circumstances surrounding failure may be deliberate or environmental. Some times an idea just doesn’t find its place or time. Some time a decision goes the wrong way. Soem imes the markets changes. Sometimes a great whopping global pandemic comes along. Always though there is risk.
Life in the fast lane.
Many of the hyenas have accused Jake of living a high life, and of squandering investors’ money on that high life. But they present no evidence to support those accusations. When challenged, they threatened and attacked Jake’s friends and supporters.
They didn’t like the way Jake dressed or the shoes he wore. So what…? Business skill and dress sense are irrevocably linked. This is a young guy who sold his first business for six figures to the notoriously frugal New Zealand Government – while he was still at school. His list of interviewees is long and distinguished.
As an invest prospect, Jake and Unfiltered probably looked pretty good. But there’s always risk.
And no one deserves to be hunted and hounded just because they struggle to maintain initial success, certainly not by those who haven’t taken or can’t take- that’s you, NZ media – the plunge into high-end entreprenuralism.
When I was doing lesson learned, one of the early ephiphanies was that the best incentive for learning was a good punch in the nose. You don’t learn by walking, you learn by stumbling and getting back up again and stumbling and getting back up again.
Unfiltered was probably not Jake’s final destination. It was more likely a stepping stone on the way to something else. There is nothing to indicate that he wasn’t capable to picking himself up and starting over. He was only 26. Many of his attackers would have already had the same experience, some numerous times.
Except for the media hyenas. Those who cannot. But who choose to judge. Who stalk and and harass. Who threaten and attack when challenged.
Hardly the most professional of communication
National Business Review can say it was just doing its job, that it has to push hard to get the facts but really, all it was doing was bullying under the guise of journalism. Every good journo in New Zealand should be calling this behaviour out. Not just the publication but the individual staff that are doing it and the management that are allowing it.
Ignore NBR. But do contact your MP and shadow MP and ask then what they are going to do to introduce New Zealand’s media (or elements thereof) to the concepts of accountability and responsibility.
For many of us, “Cover me!!” means we’re about to do something that may not turn out well…not so much a military “Hold My Beer!” as this needs doing and I’m going to need to some help… Covering fire is a little more personal than the good old ‘Fire mission, Regiment’ and other such methods of registering one’s unhappiness with a given individual, object or grid square…
But there’s other ways of providing cover…
Be honest, you all had a snigger when you saw this one, like, der, man…
It would be nice to think that it would be possible to deter ANZ New Zealand with a massive show (or application – I was, after all, the Force Application lead for most of my four years in the Air Force) of force/might/power. Even it such force/might/power was available, poor old ANZ New Zealand is like a mega-dinosaur controlled by a myriad of different brains that don’t talk to each other that well, if at all…any effect registered by one is unlikely to affect the others…
With ANZ New Zealand, the only brain that counts is its ego, the bit that gets worried when it might look bad; the one whose worst nightmare is a world where all its bribes of super-low interest rates (coincidentally announced just after the release of the FMA/RBNZ report on banks’ conduct in New Zealand) or the millions of look-good dollars that it invests into sports… Like the cool kids at school, looking bad is what ANZ New Zealand fears the most…it cancelled the auction of my home to prevent 1 News running the story on it…
The path to ANZ New Zealand’s main ego brain is indirect…for any direct approach to work the brain would have to care and the simple truth is that ANZ New Zealand doesn’t care what you say to it, because ‘the people’ are beneath it, beneath the executive team, beneath the board, beneath the CEO who ‘earns more in an hour’ than most Kiwis take home in a week…instead the path to ANZ New Zealand’s care factor is external and three-fold:
The political realm, especially those elected representatives who have been supportive to date. They have been looking at the changes necessary to close off all the remaining loopholes relating to banks’ lending.
The media who play a canny game of what to release when…
to be continued…(nothing worse that a looooong post….)
It’s actually not about covering me…it’s about covering each other…
I am writing to you in your capacity as the Chair of the board of directors of ANZ New Zealand.
On 8 November, ANZ will be forcibly auctioning my home. It is doing this to recover debt that accrued after ANZ, through its then subsidiary the National Bank of New Zealand, loaned to my ex-partner’s company. Through Antonia Watson [Managing Director Retail and Business Banking for ANZ New Zealand] I understand that my case has been discussed within the board, so you are probably aware of it.
Update 22 November. ANZ cancelled the auction at the last minute, probably because it was uncomfortable about the media questions. Instead, it is trying to sell my home through a forced sale by tender that closes on 30 November. This method is unlikely to realise the same return as an auction, as ANZ tries to avoid the media spotlight.
For the last five years, I have been challenging this lending with ANZ on the grounds that it should have disclosed or even sought my approval for any extension of credit against my guarantee. ANZ’s position is that it had no obligation to disclose this.
There is no direct legislative compulsion for disclosure on ANZ for company lending as there is for personal lending under the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003. That notwithstanding, ANZ’s position is weak at best:
The Code of Banking Practice places an obligation on ANZ to act fairly and reasonably towards its customers, in a consistent and ethical way. ANZ’s conduct in extending these loans to my ex-partner without disclosing them to the guarantor was neither fair, reasonable or ethical. ANZ’s conduct since I first raised my concerns with it in the way it has withheld information, misrepresented the law and fabricated information has also been neither fair, reasonable or ethical. ANZ has been consistent however that’s not always a good thing.
The Code also places an obligation on ANZ to only provide credit or increase a credit limit when the information available leads it to believe the customer will be able to meet the terms of the credit facility. It is difficult to accept that a company with inconsistent income and a director earning less than $50k p.a. could meet the terms of lending on loans totalling over $400k.
Most importantly, the Code places specific obligations on ANZ to inform any party providing security, of the customer’s obligations when a credit facility is approved. ANZ has stated that the Code’s requirements in this area apply to guarantees and security differently. While that may apply for some banks, ANZ’s own documentation, including the original guarantee and loan documents, lists guarantees as forms of security.
Various bank officers have said that ANZ does have an obligation to disclose lending to guarantors.
In 2016, ANZ accepted my position without qualification or modification. It reduced my liability under the guarantee to the value of the one loan that it not only disclosed to me and but for which it required my approval. ANZ staff have said that this was a result of my persistence arguing my case. This reduction (approx. 75-80% of the debt at the time) is not the action of a bank that is in the right.
If I was an independent guarantor, this reduction might be attractive however as the company remains joint property, I am still liable for 50% of its total debt. I have argued that the total debt should be reduced to this amount and that this reduction should take effect from the time that I first raised my concerns.
I do not hold my ex-partner responsible for this additional lending against her company. During the period of this lending, she was not well and recovering from what we know now was a serious head injury. By concealing these loans from me, ANZ denied me any opportunity to make informed decisions about continuing the guarantee or to prevent of mitigate her lending.
ANZ’s position is further weakened by its conduct since I first raised my concerns
I requested that ANZ keep me informed of the company’s financial position. ANZ said that it had no authority to disclose this information. When I finally obtained copies of the loan documentation in 2016, there was a specific clause authorising disclosure of this information to guarantors. ANZ had no grounds to withhold this information from me.
Further to that request, in 2012, the Privacy Commissioner determined that information relating to jointly-owned property used as security under a guarantee should be considered personal information for the guarantor and be releasable to the guarantor when requested. It is not credible that ANZ would not be aware of this determination.
ANZ has cited the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003 as preventing disclosure of this information to me. That is not true. By definition, this act does not apply to company lending. It is not reasonable that ANZ would not know what legislation applied to various lending circumstances.
To support ANZ’s position that the Code of Banking Practice, a senior manager fabricated a definition of ‘security provider’ that he attributed to the Code’s glossary. In truth, this term does not appear in the glossary or the text of the 2002, 2007 or 2012 versions of the Code.
ANZ told us that the company’s default on its loans would affect our daughter’s home as well. As a result, her and her partner cancelled their wedding and took on considerable additional debt to renovate it to increase its equity, so they could get an independent mortgage. Once they had committed to this course of action, ANZ changed its mind and apologised saying that staff had look at an incorrect title.
ANZ’s conduct has added extra years to the resolution of this issue. It has also caused immeasurable stress on me and members of my family. In your position and the chair of the board, I am requesting that you encourage the board to:
Cancel the impending auction of my home on 8 November.
Recalculate any debt from November 2013 when I first raised my concerns with ANZ. The delays from this point are a result of ANZ’s conduct and we should not be penalised for them.
ANZ has suggested I take responsibility for my actions – I am happy to – but in this case I would respectfully suggest that it is past time for ANZ New Zealand to take responsibility for ITS actions and do the right thing…
…pretty well sums up my day…three times I’ve been out in the rain chasing the little ratbag…I didn’t used to worry too much but she has been out on the road a couple of times now…
…she ran away at breakfast time, just in time for a fire call across to Whakapapa Village; got back to confiscate the tunnel and fill in the wooden horse…the next time, I was a little slow with the door bringing in firewood and was almost late – but definitely wet – for my FENZ annual health check; for the trifecta, she bolted past me as I was loading the RARO laptops for a SARTrack training session at the school, putting in an appearance at the gate and being confined – noisy little yap dog – in the back of the truck til I finished fire training – fun with extinguishers – tonight…
Our movie treat – and it truly was a treat – tonight was Darkest Hour, the lesser known story of Britain’s darkest hour in May 1940 when all appeared lost, the German juggernaut unstoppable and poised to cross the Channel. When surrender, at best, negotiated terms, was entirely on the cards as Britain stood alone…when the unpopular and anguished Churchill defined the fate of the nation…
I was singularly unimpressed by last year’s Dunkirk; the semi-comedy Finest Hour was more Dunkirk than Dunkirk…Darkest Hour captures that time, with France and the rest of Europe fallen, a disastrous and expensive campaign in Norway that achieved naught when Britain had to chose between standing and falling…
The pivotal underground scene probably never happened, some artistic license around the great man’s occasional habit of delving into the people. I don’t remember it from any of the histories or bios that I have read and we’ll probably never know what brought Churchill to the point of open defiance and the legendary speech that concludes:
…we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
It’s worth a listen as Churchill describes the collapse of campaign in France. This is indeed mobilising language and sending it into battle, a rare art…
Little dogs aside, it’s been a good day, a community day…I should have been writing letters and continuing the campaign but after so long, I’m just over it. Someone came up to me in the Village today and said that he used to be in the banking industry and knew a bit about it. He’d read something I had written a couple of days ago and just wanted to make sure that he’d understood it. “Here it comes” I thought, “finally the reverse smoking gun from someone who knows that points out an obvious hole in my campaign with ANZ”.
But no, he agreed with me, for personal and commercial lending, disclosure of additional lending to guarantors is expected and required. This is what is so frustrating…giving up and walking away is just not me, even less so when everything I know says that we;re in the right…but how do you poke the bully in the eye hard enough to divert it from its course?
Five years ago, this all started with an ANZ branch manager; now it’s been escalated all the way to the board of ANZ New Zealand Ltd who still intend proceeding on their juggernaut path; who had the gall to suggest that poor ANZ might not be able to recoup all the money it loaned so recklessly; who really don’t seem to get the concept of taking responsibility for their actions, or as leaders, the actions of their subordinates…
Voltaire said it first: With great power comes great responsibility. Others prefer a more-recent attribution, citing Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben in Spiderman. Churchill defined the price of greatness as responsibility…
…maybe Antonia Watson, David Hisco and their buddies on the board need to reflect on that and do the right thing…
Find inspiration in one of the popular topics on Discover. For this week’s Discover Challenge, focus on identity. You may use it simply as a one-word prompt, or tell us what the word means to you. Or you might publish a sketch that represents who you are or how you feel today, a poem about identity in our digital age, or a personal essay about who you once were.
I began drafting this post around the time of one of the recent active shooter incidents in the US. It says so much that such incidents are now so frequent that I cannot remember which it was, possibly Orlando…
The aftermath of each of these incidents is marked by bitter ‘weapon’ versus ‘ideology’ outbursts and exchanges. I do not thing that either side really gets the issues: each tragedy is little more than an excuse for each camp to dust off (not dust-off which is a far more noble act) respective meme collections.
It is America’s right to have whatever laws, rights and responsibilities that it wants to inflict on itself. I have no more problem with the Second Amendment than I do with the Fifth although I would offer that the rights of the Second should be read and applied in the context of their context i.e. as the people’s contribution to a well-regulated militia…the key phrase being well-regulated.
The ‘right’ to espouse an ideology probably falls under the First Amendment…the one that protects free speech…but again that comes with responsibilities. We have probably all heard of, if not actually read or heard the actual words, Oliver Wendell Holmes “crying fire in a theatre” quote. For the record, this is what he actually said to give context to those words:
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.
Contrary to the good Justice’s opinion – the key work in his theatre analogy is ‘falsely’ – in the information domain, the random and rabid shotgunning of the information militia (plural) is as destructive regardless of whether it has elements of truth or fact or not.
Every time those ideological memes fly, their sole function, intended or not, is to fan the flames of ideological conflict. As much as I thought it needed work (thought #1, thought #2), what we are seeing is the phenomenon that David Kilcullen theorised in The Accidental Guerrilla: the more something is ‘fixed’, the worse it gets. This is the irony of irregular warfare.
With regard to the active shooter incidents in America, there is another factor in play that may not be present or which is certainly less present in incidents. A large element of American psyche identifies with the ‘main in the white hat’, ‘one riot, one ranger’, the rugged individual standing against all odds, etc. This ethic is quite commendable and certainly not unique to the US. What sets it about in the US though is the accompanying mindset that a gun is what you use to resolve an issue.
We’re not on any sort of moral high ground here or in Australia where the national equivalent is a punch in the head, or the desire to deliver such but that ‘message’ has to be delivered up close and personal, it cannot be delivered from across the street or even across the room; and it is far easier to neutralise. In the UK, or parts thereof, the local equivalent maybe a cloth cap or the good old ‘Liverpool kiss‘…again, attacks with limited projection or lethality from afar…
It is this overwhelming cultural drive that guns solve problems that is America’s challenge. It’s not how many guns you have or what sort they may be. It’s not what you believe or who you disagree with. It’s not how accessible guns or unsocial ideologies may be. Those may all be separate concerns but, weapon or ideology, it’s the drive to resolve what angsts you with a gun that is the problem…
I love those rugged individuals roles immortalised by Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Jan Michael Vincent, etc etc but I don’t build my life around them. When I have a beef with the local council or my employer or the grit truck driver or the mailman, I don’t feel I have to to take a gun to resolve the issue or make myself feel better.
It is one thing when the line between reality and fiction becomes blurred. It is quite another when those worlds begin to overlap…where the ‘final option’ becomes the only option…
Having said that, we can hum ‘Imagine‘ all we like…COIN 101 reminds us that cultural shift happens over generations but being honest about the problem is the first step towards a solution…
I’m not really into the tourist thing…most places I go I like to slip away, wander around, and mix with the people…pix of me doing the tourist thing are thus few and far between…
To sugar tax or not to sugar tax…is that the question..?
In a recent post, Masterchef judge Ray McVinnie supported the call for a tax on sugary drinks…
I couldn’t agree more with Niki Bezzant who in her Herald column this morning called for a tax on sugary drinks. Her petition is a great idea and the beginning of a social change movement to curb the processed food industry’s use of ingredients and technology that is simply bad for our biology.
The test for the harm such food does to humans is the fact that any population that abandons a traditional diet for one made up of western processed foods becomes sick and in the words of American chef, Alice Waters, dies a long slow death. She also says that there is no such thing as cheap food, you either pay now or pay later!
The processed food industry is in a similar position to the tobacco industry thirty years or so ago. No one could quite believe that smoking was harmful and industry resistance was strong. Think about attitudes to tobacco today.
As for worrying about the effect on low income people, this type of processed food is unnecessary, there is still lots of good food that people can afford, no matter your income.
But one thing that is never mentioned is cooking. Teaching people to cook is like giving a hungry person the fishing rod not the fish. It gives people power over their diet, teaches people about food and expands their food choices.
There is no point forbidding everything if you don’t give people an alternative. Once people know how to create their own food, the toxic products of the processed food industry become irrelevant because you don’t need them.
It also reinforces the important socialising effect of home cooked food because it is generally served at the shared table, the place where you learn to behave.
I am not advocating trying to turn the clock back as that is impossible and ridiculous, as are naive ideas like using other things to make food sweet.
Face it, any food that is sweet is made with sugar in some form or a chemical sweetener (stevia is perhaps an exception, but sweetness is still an addictive flavour wherever it comes from).
Well done Ms Bezzant, more please.
I think that Ray somewhat looses the plot about halfway through his post. He starts and finishes by applauding the call for a ‘sugar tax’ but wanders in between to advocating for better education in preparing food.
He compares the processed food industry today with the tobacco industry of thirty years ago but misses the connection that increasing the tax on tobacco has not been the big nudge to drive smokers to drop their habit. If anything, the biggest motivation for smokers to give up has been the banning of smoking in bars, especially in winter when the attractions of a smoke are outweighed by the unpleasantness of the weather.
Increasing the tax on tobacco has not caused a massive reduction in the numbers of smokers in New Zealand and it is unlikely that a tax on sugary drinks will drive any great improvement in national health statistics. Considering statistics on the consumption of tobacco and alcohol, it is more than likely that consumption will remain much the same.
It would be nice to think that an increase in the tax on sugary drinks might be accompanied by a reduction in the tax on fruit and vegetables. While I would personally support this, as I consume far more fresh fruit and vegetables than I do sugary drinks, I don’t think that it would create the desired effect: healthy people would get healthy, unhealthy people would continue with their unhealthy habits….just look at the smoking lobby or those who drink to excess and/or by habit…
Sugary drinks and fresh fruit and veg are chalk and cheese and cannot be managed in a tit for tat manner: those who prefer one over the other will continue to do so regardless of cost. Those less affluent will always find money for those perceived needs over the staples of life and wellness. Thus, faux comparisons like cauliflowers v Happy Meals do not help the cause for an effective information and education programme. Try buying your kids a head of cauli as a treat and see how far you get…everything has its place…
Two key truisms about taxes are that they are usually unfair to someone and people will always find a way around. It would be as effective to create a tax that targets those with an adverse BMI figure…
The body mass index (BMI) or Quetelet index is a value derived from the mass (weight) and height of an individual. The BMI is defined as the body mass divided by the square of the body height, and is universally expressed in units of kg/m2, resulting from mass in kilograms and height in metres.
That way, would we not be targeting only those adversely affecting by an over-sugared diet? Of course we wouldn’t! Any tax-based attempt to change people’s habits is doomed to failure. Similarly we would require all couches to trigger a minor electrical shock every 30 minutes to ‘encourage’ their occupants to get up and do something. Do you think Dunedin would the only place in New Zealand where couch burning is a recognised sport..?
The key is not nanny state tax manipulation but, as Ray points out – kind of – information and education.Even with the best information and education programmes, though, we do need to accept that not everyone will get the message and climb aboard…we can only save those want to get aboard the lifeboat…
Don’t get me wrong…I am concerned about the average health of our people, to the extent that I have tagged this post under ‘countering irregular threats’: not only this is a greater threat to New Zealand than more commonly accepted irregular threats like terrorism or crime but the solutions (yes, plural!) also lie in similar approaches i.e. the changes necessary to create a positive effect will be drive by culture not by mandate or coercion…
The World According to Me... 